Monetsite
This is about monetizing your sites. And mine too, of course.
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Have you ever heard of Alex Jeffreys?
Until very recently I hadn’t either. I used to be a gooron groupie,
and bought all kinds of courses and seminars that were supposed
to help me make more money off my sites. That was an expensive
period of learning what didn’t work.
I know the names of all the big windmills, who so eloquently
conned me into selling their stuff to newbies and promote their
own names towards sainthood and beyond. They made good
money, but most of the people who bought their stuff probably
would have gotten a better return for their time and money if
they had worked at McDonalds.
Then I read Alex Jeffreys “Gurus Dream”. His thoughts in there
totally resonated with mine. The way to success is not through
buying more new and improved wonder programs, but through
building a solid business foundation.
So I signed up for his on-line seminar course. Yeah, here we
go again. Picture my secretary rolling her eyes.
She also mentioned that there were still some unopened books
on the shelf behind me. Well, at least Alex Jeffreys promised
to do it all on-line.
Seminar
The first thing I noticed was that Jeff is definitely not a cookie
cutter cloned windmill. Instead of the slick and well practiced
hypnotizing attempts of the big name goorons, he came across
as a regular guy, who is just learning how to do seminars.
Most noteworthy in the first seminar was his comment that
the profits are not in the web site,
but in the business behind it.
I can certainly chime in with a loud “AMEN!” to that. In the
fourteen years that I have made my living on the web, I have
helped hundreds of people to get established on the net,
but because they refused to set up the business part and
instead focused on being creative, most of them were never
able to give up their day jobs.
Considering how easy it is nowadays, to set up a merchant
account to receive online payments, there is no excuse
for procrastinating with that most important step.
EMAIL addresses
Alex also talked about email accounts.
Don’t do as he does, do as he says!
Make yourself easily accessible.
Abandoning good addresses just because you can’t figure
out how to deal with spam, is dumb! Alex Jeffreys is a great
mentor in many ways, but when it comes to email, he flunked.
Get yourself Mailwasher, at least the
free version, and take control of your email. Don’t waste
your time with blacklists. Spammers never use the same
address twice anyway, and often forge yours as the sender.
Automatic blacklisting just blacklists your own address.
Instead, use the filters. See what is common with most
spam, and use those common traits as filter triggers.
Don’t procrastinate with that! Either learn how to deal with
spam, or outsource it. Once you get the hang of making
spam filters, it actually becomes a fun game to stay on top
of your email.
I get about 5,000 pieces of email a day, but I only see the
200 or so that I actually NEED to see and answer.
Don’t let spam chase you out of town and abandon a good
address. Nuke the spam instead.
I guess I should write a book about spam control.
OK, added to the To-Do list.
Domain Names
Before you register a domain name, do some homework about
registrars. The one to avoid at all costs is Network Solutions.
They were good once, a long time ago, and I even was an
affiliate VAR for them for five years in the early and mid 90’s.
But they got too big and too hard to deal with.
With all other registrars, keep in mind that the lower the cost,
the lower the service quality. If you enjoy arguing with
auto-responders and robo-responders, go for the lowest price.
We still charge $10 per registration, unchanged since 98,
even for the newer ones like .ca. The extra service we provide
becomes obvious, if you for some reason have to change your
address. Instead of arguing with auto-responders, you simply
skype dearwebby or email h@webby.com, and we
take care of it for you.
Next is to think of a domain name.
Alex Jeffreys favors personal names in the domain name.
I prefer descriptive names, and as short as possible.
Every extra letter in the domain name invites typos, and may
send visitors to your competitor, or worse yet, to a vulture.
Vultures register domains with slight mis-spellings and
harvest all the typo visitors.
I registered the name for this site specifically for this
Alex Jeffreys seminar, so that I would not have an unfair
advantage with an established site over people starting
out fresh.
Sure, I could have chosen “monetizeyoursite”, but figured
that compassion with your typo finger will in the long run
outweigh spelling it out, and so I shortened it to monetsite.com
OK, enough for tonight.
Have FUN!
DearWebby
